In cellular wireless communications networks each cell has a base station that a user's mobile phone communicates directly with. The number of cells that serves an area depends on the density of population in that specific area. Traditionally, these cells have mainly handled voice and limited data (e.g. SMS) but more recently in 3 G networks mobile broadband has brought the World Wide Web and other Internet based communications (email, Instant Messaging, etc) directly to a user's handset.
With the advent of HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) and LTE (Long Term Evolution) more and more data will need to be transferred to the radio network. 3 G LTE/SAE (Long Term Evolution/System Architecture Evolution) is the next step in terms of user-service experience, improving latency, capacity and throughput. It will allow data rates above 100 Mbps. 3 G LTE supports both FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) and TDD (Time Division Duplex) with the same specification and hardware components, allowing for a large increase in system capacity and reduced cost per gigabyte. Present solutions, however, make repeated, often redundant, calls for data from the edge of the network through the radio and core parts of the telecoms network to load balanced, solutions and on to the internet in order to obtain the requested data. Subsequently, the number of requests to a given URL (Uniform Resource Locator) increases and response times for the delivery of information as well as amount of data being transferred across the network increase significantly.